8 fun facts about It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown

The Peanuts animated special It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown is celebrating it’s 49th year on the air this year. It airs tonight on ABC. Kids today can watch it whenever they want, but when I was a kid it was appointment television.

Here are eight fun facts you may not know about it:

1. It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown was the third animated Peanuts special to air on TV, preceded by the epic Charlie Brown Christmas the year before and Charlie Brown’s All-Stars! CBS asked for another “blockbuster” and this one delivered.
2. This was the first Peanuts special to use the naming device of a phrase, followed by “Charlie Brown.” All the specials thereafter used this naming scheme.
3. Animator Bill Melendez and director Lee Mendelson always insisted that children’s—not adult’s–voices be used in the specials. The one exception is Snoopy, who was voiced by Melendez himself for the first time in Pumpkin, and for the rest of the cartoons for nearly 40 years.
4. In the scene where Lucy is looking at the TV Guide, her own picture is on the cover.
5. The idea of Snoopy pretending to be the famous World War I “Flying Ace” fighter pilot, first imagined in the comic strips, came from Charles Schultz’s son Monte, who was obsessed with WWI aircraft and suggested the idea to his dad.
6. Snoopy’s Flying Ace persona became a good luck charm for NASA’s Apollo astronauts and a symbol of safety for NASA. The Apollo 10 crew even brought aboard a painting of the Flying Ace into space and named their lunar module “Snoopy” because it was to skim the moon’s surface and snoop around for a landing spot for Apollo 11.
7. Kathy Steinberg, the little girl who voiced Sally, had trouble pronouncing the word “restitution.” The solution was to have her voice each syllable separately and then splice it together.
8. Kids were so upset about Charlie Brown getting rocks that they mailed candy to him care of CBS.